I enjoy doodling and I regularly exhaust my Tungsten E’s battery by creating doodles like the ones above with Notepad. The PDA app is meant for taking down quick freehand notes but I’ve found it makes a decent basic doodling tool.
Notepad has its shortcomings, though. It has no support for colours. There are only three fixed pen widths and an eraser which can’t be resized. There’s no undo function to instantly undo bad strokes. Finally, there’s no simple way of exporting your doodles to your PC. You can export notes as PNG file attachments in an e-mail client but if you want to simply save doodles on your PC you will have to copy the picture in Palm Desktop, paste it into a graphics program and save it. Clunky.
There are several freeware graphics programs available for the Palm PDA but I’ve had the worst luck with them. They’re all superior to Notepad but flawed in some critical way. The frustrating thing is I don’t know where to even begin troubleshooting the problems. Is it the app? Is it a conflict with another app? Is it the OS? Is it the hardware? Gah. I thought I’d list them in the hopes you have better luck with them than I did.
DrawIt, from New Zealand, gets a lot of recommendations and it’s easy to see why from the sample gallery. However, I’ve been frustrated by a bug in the app that prevents a saved picture from loading completely. Judging from comments from other users, it’s not an uncommon problem. Unfortunately, the developer has stopped worked on it so it doesn’t look like a fix is in the offing. The upside is he’s released the source code so perhaps someone could take a look at it.
PixMarker and MoePaint are both from Japan. They’re full of features (MoePaint even includes support for layers) but they both cause HotSync freezes on my PC.
PalmPaint may not have the features of the other apps but it’s still head and shoulders above Notepad. Unfortunately, it’s buggy and it appears it’s not been worked on for five years.
If anyone has managed to get the above apps working on their T|E, I’d appreciate a note since it would give me enough hope to begin looking for a fix for my problems with them. Otherwise, I’ll just resign myself to using Notepad.
